Robert Sarah

Robert Sarah (born 15 June 1945) is a Guinean prelate of the Catholic Church.

Sarah was born in Ourous, a rural village in then French Guinea, on 15 June 1945, the son of cultivators and converts to Christianity from animism.

He is a member of the Coniaguis ethnic group in northern Guinea.

In 1957, at age 12, he entered Saint Augustine Minor Seminary in Bingerville, Ivory Coast, where he studied for three years.

Because in 1960 relations between newly independent Guinea and the Ivory Coast were strained, he continued his studies briefly in Conakry, Guinea, at Saint Mary of Dixinn Seminary run by the Holy Ghost Fathers, until the radical government of Guinea expropriated Church property in August 1961.

After independent study at home, the Church negotiated a place for Sarah and some fellow seminarians at a government-run school in Kindia in March 1962 and then won the right to open a seminary, where Sarah earned his baccalaureate in 1964.

In September of that year he was sent to study at the Grand Seminary in Nancy, France.

Again deteriorating international relations, this time between Guinea and France, forced him to interrupt his studies, and he completed his theological studies in Sébikotane, Senegal, between October 1967 and June 1969.

From 1969 to 1974 he studied at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, where he obtained a licentiate in theology, except for the year 1971 which he spent at the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum of Jerusalem, where he obtained a licentiate in Sacred Scriptures.

Sarah speaks French, English, Spanish and Italian fluently.

Sarah was ordained to the priesthood on 20 July 1969, and incardinated in the Diocese of Conakry.

On 13 August 1979, Pope John Paul II appointed him Metropolitan Archbishop of Conakry.

He was consecrated bishop on 8 December 1979 by Cardinal Giovanni Benelli.

He served as Conakry's bishop for more than twenty years and during that tenure filled terms as president of the Guinean bishops' conference and of the Episcopal Conference of West Africa.

He has the right to vote in papal conclaves until his 80th birthday.

Sarah served as archbishop under the dictatorship of Ahmed Sékou Touré, who put Sarah on a death-list before dying in 1984.

However, despite the persecutions of priests and laymen, Sarah worked to maintain the Church as the one institution that was independent of the dictatorship.

In his book God or Nothing, Sarah rebuked the Marxist dictatorship as a utopian scheme that brought misery and death.

The French daily newspaper Le Figaro reports that Sarah "did not hesitate to oppose the all-powerful Sékou Touré, then 'supreme leader of the revolution' but also a commander of violent repressions. He made the celebrated public statement: 'power wears man out [le pouvoir use l'homme]!

On 1 October 2001, John Paul II named him secretary of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, a post he held for ten years.

He used the occasion of his departure from Guinea, when he was awarded the country's highest honor, to condemn the government of Lansana Conté.

He said that Guinean society was "built on the oppression of the insignificant by the powerful, on contempt for the poor and the weak, on the cleverness of poor stewards of the public good, on the bribery and corruption of the administration and the institutions of the republic".

The Historical Dictionary of Guinea commented on Sarah's role in resisting Sékou Touré's dictatorship, writing that the Church "managed to play a remarkable role under former Archbishop Robert Sarah in Guinea's public life... Monsignor Robert Sarah is one of the most respected leaders among Guineans, who expressed their strong desire to see him lead the country's political transition on various occasions between 2006 and 2010. He arguably earned much of this popular trust by speaking truth to power during the stormiest years of president Ahmed Sékou Touré's regime, while other spiritual leaders endeavored to cater to the regime."

The first was Peter Cardinal Turkson of Ghana who was appointed president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace in 2009.

A cardinal since 20 November 2010, he was prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments from 23 November 2014 to 20 February 2021.

Sarah previously served as secretary of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples under Pope John Paul II and president of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum under Pope Benedict XVI.

Sarah has been a vocal advocate for the defense of traditional Catholic teaching on questions of sexual morality and the right to life, and in denouncing Islamic radicalism.

He has called gender ideology and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) the "two radicalizations" that threaten the family: the former through divorce, same-sex marriage, and abortion; the latter with child marriage, polygamy, and the subjugation of women.

He has been described as largely sympathetic to liturgical practices of the era before the Second Vatican Council, but has also proposed that partisans of different liturgies learn from each other and seek a middle ground.

On 20 November 2010, Pope Benedict XVI made him Cardinal-Deacon of San Giovanni Bosco in Via Tuscolana.

In October 2010 he was appointed president of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum, which carries responsibility for organising Catholic relief efforts worldwide.

He was the second African appointed by Pope Benedict XVI to lead a Vatican dicastery.

He was a cardinal elector in the 2013 papal conclave that elected Pope Francis.

He was mentioned in the press as a possible candidate for the papacy, papabile, both in 2013 and in future conclaves.

On 23 November 2014, Pope Francis appointed Sarah as Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments.

In 2016 Sarah called for priests to face the same direction as the congregation while celebrating Mass (ad orientem), although facing the congregation had become the prevailing practice since the Second Vatican Council.

His advice was seen by some as a direct challenge to Pope Francis, a claim that Sarah rejects.

An advocate of traditional Catholic marriage doctrine in opposition to same-sex marriage, he has denounced "Western homosexual and abortion ideologies", suggesting that both are of "demonic origin", and he has compared them to Nazism and Islamic terrorism.

Sarah has been mentioned as papabile, a possible candidate for the papacy, by international media outlets such as Le Monde and by Catholic publications including Crux and the Catholic Herald.

On 21 January 2016, Sarah announced that participation in the Holy Thursday foot-washing rite (the mandatum) was no longer limited to men, following instructions from Pope Francis who had included women since the beginning of his papacy.